At present the Hogeschool Wittenborg is busy preparing its accreditation through the Netherlands Accreditation Organisation (NVAO), which it is obliged to do under Dutch law. At present all Dutch institutes are obliged to accredit their courses through the NVAO.

Last year the accreditation report for Wittenborg was submitted but not taken into account by the NVAO, due to a procedure mistake, primarily to do with the quality assurance consultancy, hired-in during 2005 to carry out the accreditation. Details of this submission are found on the NVAO site, under “Beoordeelde Opleidingen”

Now the Hogeschool Wittenborg has taken a new quality management consultancy to carry out the accreditation submission to the NVAO, manly the Netharlands Quality Association (NQA)

It has been determined that the International Bachelor’s programme should be separately accredited, as its programme, staff and personnel, teachers, organization and management are different to the Dutch programmes.

This means that in the coming 12 weeks many international staff members will be asked to assist the newly formed Accreditation Team , the so-called “A-Team”, in preparing and presenting the documentation in advance of the inspection which will be carried out by an internationally orientated panel somewhere in June. The acrediation report will be prepared and submitted in English.

Colleague Harry Maatjes has been asked to lead the A-Team.

Staff will be kept up-to-date with the accreditation progress, and involved in the process through the Intranet site /courses/acreditation06 ( Acreditation 2006) – this link will also be placed in Staff and Teachers Resources.

The emphasis of the extra work required from staff will be mainly concentrated in the first month, as document collection and correlation will be carried out.

Students will be kept up-to-date through Student’s Resources, and regular bulletins on this site.